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California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued ExxonMobil Monday, accusing the oil giant of a “decades-long campaign of deception” about the effectiveness of plastic recycling.
Bonta filed the lawsuit Monday in San Francisco County Superior Court, alleging that ExxonMobil has been “deceiving Californians for half a century through misleading public statements and slick marketing promising that recycling would address the ever-increasing amount of plastic waste ExxonMobil (XOM) produces.”
The AG is seeking an abatement fund, disgorgement, and civil penalties for the plastic pollution harm it says ExxonMobil caused. The civil suit is the first of its kind targeting a company that many see as a key driver behind climate change.
Bonta said ExxonMobil lied in an attempt “to convince us that plastic recycling could solve the plastic waste and pollution crisis when they clearly knew this wasn’t possible. “
ExxonMobil, which is the largest investor-owned oil company in the world, is also the largest maker of the polymers used in single-use plastic. Bonta says the company falsely promoted all plastic as recyclable when that is far from the case.
“This caused consumers to purchase and use more single-use plastic than they otherwise would have due to the company’s misleading public statements and advertising,” the AG’s office said in a press release. Bonta cited a 12-page editorial ExxonMobil placed in Time Magazine in 1989 about “the urgent need to recycle.”
To this day, only 5% of plastic in the U.S. is recycled.
The news comes as California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law Sunday that bans all plastic shopping bags.
In a statement to Quartz, an ExxonMobil spokesperson said, “For decades, California officials have known their recycling system isn’t effective. They failed to act, and now they seek to blame others. Instead of suing us, they could have worked with us to fix the problem and keep plastic out of landfills. The first step would be to acknowledge what their counterparts across the U.S. know: advanced recycling works. To date, we’ve processed more than 60 million pounds of plastic waste into usable raw materials, keeping it out of landfills. We’re bringing real solutions, recycling plastic waste that couldn’t be recycled by traditional methods.”
This article was updated to include a comment from ExxonMobil.